The "Surge" is TWICE What Bush Claims

Bush has been moving ahead with McCain's pet project of "surging" into the Iraq quagmire with an additional 21,500 troops. Problem is, he's lying about that number. It is looking more like twice that number. From DefenseTech.org:

...a new study [pdf] by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says the real troop increase could be as high as 48,000 -- more than double the number the President initially said.

That's because the combat units that President Bush wants to send into hostile areas need to be backed up by support troops, "including personnel to staff headquarters, serve as military police, and provide communications, contracting, engineering, intelligence, medical, and other services," the CBO notes.

[from the report]: "Over the past few years , DoD’s practice has been to deploy a total of about 9,500 personnel per combat brigade to the Iraq theater, including about 4,000 combat troops and about 5,500 supporting troops.

"DoD has not yet indicated which support units will be deployed along with the added combat forces, or how many additional troops will be involved. Army and DoD officials have indicated that it will be both possible and desirable to deploy fewer additional support units than historical practice would indicate. CBO expects that, even if the additional brigades required fewer support units than historical practice suggests, those units would still represent a significant additional number of military personnel."

More lies. Expect troop numbers, cost and time of deployment to all be much higher than we are being told. Well, isn't it convenient that Bush's next quagmire is right next door to Iraq. How long before we are bogged down on a solid battle front from Syria to Afghanistan, fighting every group of Muslim there is?

Bookmark/Search this post with:

| | | | |